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Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Adaptation - Two variant tarot cards

I'd never really been a fan of woodcuts until I encountered Lynd Ward's "Gods' Man: A Novel in Woodcuts" in a little used bookstore.

Ward's style really spoke to me, and I thought it was an amazingly sophisticated precursor to the modern graphic novel.

When I was asked to do a card for a collaborative deck, a bunch of fun, pop culture ideas ran through my head, but I rejected them all and eventually chose instead to do an homage Ward, as the quiet sensibility really felt like it would fit in well with tarot.

Speaking of pop culture...

My other adaptation was a similarly divergent method. While Strength, above, was an adaptation of tarot content with a foreign style, the Happy Squirrel was foreign content, adapted to the Marseille style.

This one was a lot of fun to research, since I really enjoy how weird medieval illustrations of animals are, and got to try my hand at making something both mostly recognizable and pretty creepy.

For those of you who might have looked at the Marseille kickstarter we've been running, the Happy Squirrel is pretty close to being included as an add-on, and there's a little under a week left in the project.